Saturday, August 5, 2017

Official Rockman Website Gets Redesigned

Today, Capcom Japan completely overhauled the official Rockman website. The refresh provides better representation for all series under the brand, such as this page that breaks down which games are currently available to download. The product page shows off new and upcoming Rockman goods, and the history page charts each series along a timeline. What's more, the history page goes on record to declare, "the total number of games is over 130 with cumulative sales over 31 million! (as of March 31st, 2017)."

Anyway, nothing too groundbreaking here. It's nice to see Capcom tidying things up a bit before the 30th anniversary gets rolling, though. If anything is in the works, it will have this nice, clean website to present itself.

The Mega Man games were never positioned to sell like any of the other games you listed.

Capcom made them differently, promoted them differently (see also: very little) and what you get is a series that sells differently.

Not that it's necessarily a problem mind you. They made the games that way on purpose. A different approach to making them profitable. Though the effects it had on the long term health of the franchise is questionable.

Mega Man never made that much. The original dev team including Inafune had to beg and work overtime for the opportunity to make Mega Man 2. That was successful, but they only ever did the same thing with small variations since that game. That was 6 years of nothing but classic, NES Mega Man games releasing around Christmas, and a handful of outsourced spinoffs on the Game Boy. By then, Super Nintendo had already been out for 3 years since 1990, and Mega Man X was released only a month after Mega Man 6 hit Japan.

It's hard to say what there was more of: demand for Mega Man games, or a desire for Capcom and/or the devs to keep milking the same Mega Man games, but one thing is clear: Mega Man has been in franchise fatigue since before the 2000s, and even with solid revivals like Mega Man X, it never stopped going downhill. Compare the release schedule of Mega Man to other top-selling franchises, like Super Mario Bros or Castlevania. There were usually two to three years between releases of about three games, tops, before the SNES hit. We never needed 6 classic Mega Man games and 5 Game Boy spinoffs, not counting other obscure titles like Wily and Light's Rockboard. We probably would've been better off with three good NES games, and then maybe three classic SNES games to follow it. Mega Man X may have never happened, or at least not until much later, like the Playstation. It might've been something completely different, like a 3D game or something instead of Legends. The point is, Mega Man needed to become something bigger, better, and more marketable.

We haven't even touched on the marketing for the games. What kind of marketing campaign was there for Mega Man outside Japan? Not much, right? Japan got great commercials for the games that were faithful to the Japanese designs, but because the American side of the business didn't get that, we got stuff like the bad box art renditions of Mega Man, along with the Ruby Spears cartoon. This doesn't matter as much, though, because Mario and Zelda got similar treatments, and it just means they were popular enough to market through childrens' programming. So Mega Man was popular, but I don't think he rode his popularity nearly as well as either Mario or Sonic, and I think a lot of that has to do with how he was marketed, at least outside of Japan.

There's enough blame to go around on both sides. The development/Japanese side of the business only knew how to milk the same thing over and over again. The advertising/American side of the business didn't get the character. Look at the TV show they're releasing now: at least Rock/Aki is a kid, but it's still a far cry from what the character actually looks like, spinoff or not.

Stop blaming companies and lack of advertisement for the lack of Megaman's popularity or whatever other excuse. It's simply not that popular, deal with it.

Mario is a cultural icon and poster child from one of the leading console manufacturers and biggest companies in japan.

GTA is a highly casual friendly controversial urban maturely violent/sexual/vulgar thematic brand that has a domino effect of popularity and reinvestment in itself, in other words the more money and publicity it gets the bigger the next game becomes because of it, partly due to the studio that makes it pretty much being dedicated to it and it alone (inb4 "manhunt" *rolls eyes*).

Pokémon is an anomaly, and has the backing and circumstance of one of the 3 leading hardware manufactures in the industry.

CoD who csres... It seems like something a bunch of people would pick up. It seems extremely western casual friendly...

There really wasn't much wrong with Megaman, not it's overall game quality, not its development cycles, none of that. Who knows, in an alternate universe things could be exactly as they are now with the exception that Megaman 2 sold 4mill, MM3 2mill, MMX 3mill X2 1.5mill, X4 2.7mill ect ect for a total of an eventual 95mill from 130 games. Which is logical because this is what most people think the games sale like until they see the actual sales figures, like I did.

You've offered little else but denial and stating the obvious. All I can gather from what you're saying is it doesn't matter what Capcom did with Mega Man. Either the basic concept and formula could only go so far--in which case Mega Man needed some kind of change--or the time wasn't right for Mega Man.

I'm saying the world is full of randomness and not every time can people point the finger for some one thing or whatever responsible for misfortunes.

Hence my alternate universe example at the end there. So maybe if things were slightly different things might change, maybe if a butterfly landed on a different leaf at one point it would have made everyone looooove Megaman and it'd be a trillion dollar franchise who knows. Point is it's not.

You want to point the finger and blame crap not me DEAL WITH IT and stop being salty.

The tone of your comments are way out of line with what other people are saying here and quite frankly I'm not sure why your comments have been allowed to go through because of it.

Someone simply said they were surprised about the sales of the series and compared it to others, then the other anon and myself came in and explained in a perfectly reasonable way why the series has sold the way it has.

Then you come in acting rude, calling people "salty" and telling people to "deal with it" for simply pointing things out and trying to have a simple discussion on the franchise and its sales. In fact, by pointing those things out we have shown that we are in fact "dealing with it" and recognize why the series has sold the way it has, so there really is no call at all for your attitude here.

If you don't have anything to contribute beyond saying something like "even if it had been better promoted, I don't think the sales ceiling for the series is particularly high" or something along those lines, that would be fine. But so far all you've done is talk down to people in a rude way for no reason and contributed essentially nothing to a potential conversation.